Tortured Ghosts
by Sleydo
Summary: [Takeshi Kovacs novels fic, Woken Furies sequel] When the Envoys fail to put down the revolution brewing on Harlan's World, the Protectorate resorts to a new and untested form of enforcer.
1. Chapter 1

I awoke in the sleeve a few hours after sunrise.

The upload would have occurred around midnight. After that, about 9 hours in the strange disembodied limbo of pre-consciousness as I assembled myself. No dreams, or at least I can't remember any. Occasionally, when I try to remember, Envoy recall can supply me with a twisting, fractal pattern of endless chains that's never quite the same as the last time I remembered it. Some variation of what in non-Envoys would be a Kluver constant, a neural pattern representative of the constellations of low-level brain structure that map out persona and being.

I came into being like smoke forming the shape of a human face.

I found myself already awake and moving. Envoy conditioning snapped taut wires of control across the gaping holes between motive and motor control, tying tight tourniquets to shut down the symptoms that normally plagued the newly-sleeved. I might have stumbled half a step in the first few moments of my existence in this body, but it was unnoticeable amongst the crowd.

The sleeve had been walking down one of the major thoroughfares. Crowds of people all around, moving half with clear purpose and half in diffusive motion, energized by the endless stream of advertising casts across every spectrum from pheromone to t-ray. The broad street the crowd mingled through was girded on either side with towers that ran like highways into the sky, air traffic swooping endlessly between skywalks and skyscrapers with vertigo-inducing speed. Yet there was a sense of muted choreography to it all, in the patterns of the air cars and the unexpected grace in which the people stepped into and back out of each other's way, as if they'd rehearsed it earlier before performing it for me now. Far above, at the height of the air traffic, holographic advertising and news displays flickered schizophrenically between product ideograms and human beings that performed for them like puppet masters, who looked down on us all with the vacant yet beatific expressions of gods. Something deep in me woke up, connecting and parsing stimuli, and filled me with a heady mixture of sensation. Unfamiliar and unwelcome sights and smells wove together from signal noise to mosiac, and points of exploitation-_body language shows emotional vulnerability...excellent sniping position on the left apartment rooftop-_perked up at me from everywhere like the ends of frayed threads. My Envoy conditioning-sometimes like a weaponized shell around my self, sometimes like a maglev rail that pulled me along my assigned path-had apparently not lost step with me in the crowd.

This was not quite the capital city; New Tokyo hadn't been built anywhere near close enough to appropriate economic centres or militarily strategic geography. Instead it was a sort of playground for the very rich, built right in the middle of one of the orbitals' blind spots, where they couldn't fire. Not quite where the colonial freighters had crashed generations ago, but close enough for a couple memorial statues. Only here did Harlan's World support any form of air traffic. Everywhere else the orbitals shot down virtually anything that flew. The Martians have been dead for longer than humanity has existed, but their machinery remains, and on Harlan's World their satellites had been jealously guarding the privilege of flight with cold and murderous fury for centuries.

I picked my way through the sleeve's most recent memories, and let them pull me along the thoroughfare. Until I'd awoken the sleeve had belonged to one Liu Takahashi, a higher-up DeCom mercenary now acting as bodyguard/retainer for one of Harlan's spoiled aristocrat children. He had several brain augments meant for long-range wireless communications with DeCom recon teams, but he'd been low on cash until this gig, and the augs' firmware hadn't been updated for some time.

Opportunities like that don't come often. He was an obvious candidate for the viral upload.

Even now, 300 years after we built a black box for the human brain and figured out how to save souls as digital constructs, we haven't augmented our real selves all that much. Yes, you can have a sleeve with rattlesnake genes in your eyes for IR night vision and gecko microspikes on your fingers to climb headlong up the sides of featureless steel buildings. You can jack your soul into a synthetic body with graphene tendons and built-in fusion cores and the ability to eject antimatter from your hands. And of course everybody in the whole damn galaxy gets a cortical stack: A featureless grey pill that gets slotted in just under your medulla oblongata and records enough of your brain activity to recover your self after death. Barring a violent enough death to destroy the stack, a digital copy of your soul can be recovered and resleeved-reinserted into a new body-and behold: Lazarus rises again.

But for all that, our minds never really changed. It's mostly still just Cro-Magnon minds, barely evolved for the savannah plain, but with shoes and hyperspace needlecasts and sentient evolving nanoware to keep us company.

Everyone except the Envoys.

Any government that can call itself a government has to govern. Has to be in control. That requires the capability to be more violent than its civilians or any aggressive neighbors; that's been true for as long as we've been human. The Protectorate was no different. But its needs were unique in human history. It could beam information across the spiral arm by plumbing the depths of higher-order dimensions-hyperspace needlecasts-but physical objects were left to take the slow, sublight route. If any colony world ever decided to cede, and the Protectorate lost the planetside war with whatever loyalist troops it had stationed there, it would be forced to send ships. Might take hundreds of years in some cases.

That's no way to run an intergalactic civilization.

You need to win the secession war before anyone even knows it starts-that or win impossible wars with almost no resources. You need counterintelligence capabilities well beyond the mean capacities of the baseline humans you're fighting, because you have to completely outclass the baselines. You need regime engineers-something very different than soldiers or armies. Something that can manipulate and empathize through a synthetic emotion and conviction that resembles sociopathy, draw impossible extrapolations on marginal or no data with unerring accuracy...predict, subvert, manipulate, murder, betray. You need total superiority, like an antibody disassembling a cancer from the inside out.

And it's not bodies you're freighting into the combat zone, it's _minds_. Whatever bodies those souls are dropped into on the other side, that's what they have to work with. It's not about building a superior body. It's about building a mind that uses the existing biological machinery in a vastly more effective way than what stepped out of the savannah and into space. It's about building a superior class of consciousness, or at least the parcel of memories and personality that get packaged neatly into a digitized human and shipped across space that you might poetically refer to as a _soul_.

The Envoy Corps is a military force of posthumans. The recruits are mostly taken in from conventional military services-helps mitigate potential loyalty issues, one rogue Envoy is more than enough trouble for any planet-and our minds are disassembled inside a virtual construct. They put us back together rather differently than when we came in.

When it comes to the most basic change, the best term is _differently conscious_, or maybe even _hyperconscious. _Our minds are institutions, to an extent: thousands of subroutine employees and instruments whirring away with the lonely executive that is your consciousness at the top of the chain, an iceberg resting on an ocean of subsystems. It's a review and communications system, mostly, a way of reflecting on actions of the past while modeling the future, a little businessman trying to keep apprised of the goings-on while handing out business cards. With baselines, it's arguable that 'they' aren't entirely in control at all. Envoy conditioning throws most of that out the window. Mental discipline and self-control that began with the semi-religious disciplines practiced in Asiatic cultures for centuries, toned and rarefied with cognitive and neuroscientific innovations and alterations that gives the soul a new lease on the body. Total control, when necessary, over the underlying subroutines in an impossibly unstable framework, held together by a level of self discipline that makes Envoys capable of stopping their own hearts. It leaves us capable of taking intuitive leaps that would make any savant detective of baseline human history proud, of assimilating contextual data fast enough to adapt to entirely new worlds and cultures within days of awakening, with total recall, with reflex and muscle coordination that breaks every baseline record with ease, with an almost complete resistance to a variety of psychoactive drugs...

If it wasn't for the fact the Protectorate also burns out every conditioned or genetic barrier against committing violence, ex-Envoys would probably be highly valued in any colony worlds we visited, rather than barred from holding any position above menial.

But I digress.

Liu's client was an even hundred or so meters away, some second cousin offshoot of Mitzi Harlan's genealogy that made them important enough for a bodyguard or two. Liu's role was meant to be covert enough to let them go about their day. I hanged backwards a little ways more from the client, maybe a hundred ten meters.

It was a nice day. The sun blotted out the motion of the air cars above until they hurt to look at. The puppet motions of the cast actors far beyond that, still rhapsodizing at nothing.

From above, the whirring of an aircar motor, suddenly slammed into overdrive. Some otherwise ubiquitous Harkany Systems ride dove out of the flow of traffic and came downwards like a missile.

It was a missile.

The beginnings of surprise from the crowd, but in the end there wasn't even time for anyone to respond. Least of all the Harlan aristo Liu was supposed to be guarding. I dove for cover under the press of bodies, managing to cover my ears before the eardrum-shattering pressure wave from the crash.

When I got up again, it was terrible carnage. Bodies, whole and broken, tossed and littered like fragments of paper. Screams and wails from all around. The aircar itself was almost intact-_they build those things tough, don't they-_but the driver had had a running start of about half a kilometer of vertical distance and had managed to reach a sizable fraction of terminal velocity before they'd hit. The car's front was busted to fragments the size of my hand, and the driver's cabin was unrecognizable. Charred remnants of a body inside, barely enough to draw even a DNA sample. Let alone a cortical stack.

Good.

I let my Envoy conditioning draw in the sea of human suffering and incomprehension around me. I let it pull me under, add shellshocked latency to my movements. I moved away from the epicentre, gave myself a moment to draw in the sight, and then surged back towards the wounded, running on adrenaline and a building synthesized rage. The nearest was missing an arm; Liu's reflexes pulled his shirt apart and began to fashion a tourniquet.

I turned Liu's head back to the shocked, unharmed elements of the aristo crowd behind me. They'd backed away with the jittery fear of those truly unused to violence.

"The hell are you doing!" I barked. "Help me!"

It was a full three hours before Aiura showed up. Extrapolations on prior behavior and presumed location had put her at between one hour and four; even if she didn't we'd run the scam again some other time. She should have been sending lackeys, or just left the situation to AI constructs while she parsed and interpreted to her masters in some incognito location halfway across the globe away from the hot zones. But then, there didn't seem to be anywhere anymore that wasn't a hot zone as far as the Quellists were concerned. And 'hands-on' was hardcoded into Aiura's profile; you didn't need Envoy intuition to know that anyone who executed dissidents in person liked to have a firsthand perspective.

We'd had enough data to figure it would work. And we wouldn't be sacrificing anything much. For the first time in the Protectorate's history, Envoys had become expendable to an extent.

I caught a shadow of her glance in the crowd from where I was perched, on one of the police vans, in the middle of a debrief. Features borrowed and engineered from the segment of the Harlan's World ancestors that would have been called Japanese back on earth, at least nearly a millennium ago. Subtle, subdued declarations of authority in the cut of cheekbones and the cold grey eyes; it's been a few hundred years now but Harlan's World culture doesn't forget too easily that it was originally colonized by yakuza and upper-class _Tokugawa_ with Slavic Europeans as indentured labor.

I reached out with Liu's implants and touched hers. Wireless feed flickered through my consciousness like synesthesia. Handshake protocols and brief queries and missives. One or two encryption keys that had been added to my unconscious memories when I'd been needlecast in, more serial numbers to confirm manufacturer and product authenticity than anything else.

_Envoy consciousness. Protectorate enforcer. _

Aiura didn't look in my direction, but when the wireless cut out I saw some of the tendons in her neck tense, ever so slightly, at her use of an internal tannoy.

One of the police machines rose and unfolded. A synthetic voice said, "Please follow me, Takahashi-_san_."

Aiura was waiting for me, head tilted, arms folded, whole body tilted ever so slightly. There was a dancer's poise to the movements, precision-machined elegance and probably some utilitarian neurochemical combat augmentations lying in wait behind it.

She spoke in old Japanese, at least one of the few unbastardised offshoots that hadn't mingled with the rough hodgepodge and creole stew of Eurasian languages into some breed of Stripjap.

"Takahashi-_san_. I understand that you were witness to this event. Will you please come with me."

Theatre for the presumed audience. An Envoy deployment didn't often give warning to a planet's rulers that the Protectorate was no longer satisfied with their effectiveness, and in any case anything up to the Martian orbitals themselves could be compromised and listening in. We wouldn't talk until we were somewhere shielded.

Aiura's aircar was carefully crafted. Alt-cedar, synthetic organisms grown into a functioning machine. Of their own accord, the doors folded apart and then sealed us in together.

Aiura settled in beside me, face impassive. She didn't give much away, but her body language and pheromones slightly betrayed sudden relief. Finally, she and her aristo masters had received more support from on high. Minutes went by before Aiura was willing to speak. I waited in silence.

Eventually Aiura cut into the silence with elegant Japanese, tension making the syllables sharp around the edges.

"You are an Envoy? What exactly are you doing here? In that sleeve?"

I shrugged with rehearsed care, and followed the lingual shift. "Beggars and choosers. The sleeve has suitable armor for our needs, and we needed an ingress to New Tokyo that didn't raise flags. We wanted to make contact with those in Harlan's ranks who are familiar with this...debacle. Among other things, of course-other teams are pursuing different objectives at the moment. My group has been tailing various targets in New Tokyo and elsewhere, discreetly. We were rather hoping we'd run in to you, Aiura. We have many questions about the events leading to this 'Quallgrist' plague."

The best lies are mostly truth. Neglecting a few easily-missed details, Aiura had the advantage in the scenario I'd laid out for her. And after several months of watching Harlan's World slide inexorably towards total chaos, anyone would have wanted someone else to be able to take the reins. Her tone softened immediately, tasted of relief.

"This is unlooked-for so early. I am pleased to see the Protectorate has responded to these events with such alacrity. You have been briefed, I take it?"

"The situation can be roughly described as _critical_, as I understand it." I held out my hand for her to shake. "You can call me Jack."

Aiura hesitated a moment, then shook it firmly. "Welcome to Harlan's World, Jack."

I watched the world go by through the windshield. Since the aircar crash, I'd been feeling my way through the DeCom artifice that I shared cranium space with. The transmission software encoded onto it, originally an engram in my subconscious, had unfolded and differentiated into a functional structure. It was automated, somewhat like a reflex, so I relaxed enough to let it run its course and focused on the conversation.

I squeezed her hand briefly, then let go.

"If only this could have been resolved earlier," I said, eyes on some abstracted point beyond the horizon.

Aiura let out a long, slow breath. "Konrad Harlan wishes that the UN council on Earth understand the extreme nature of these events. We apologize sincerely for allowing them to escape our control. But they would test the resources of the entire Protectorate."

I snorted. "They're about to, Aiura." There was something in me that reveled in the freedom of expression I had, in the usual power balance on Harlan's World suddenly inverted with Aiura deferent and cowed. "The needle casts are going to be decommissioned in short order, for a start. Nothing human is getting transmitted in or out of Harlan's World."

"And _in_human?"

"We don't even know if the orbitals communicate with other Martian AIs at all. There's some classified research involving jamming methods, still needs some work. R&amp;D say maybe decades. We'll just have to get the situation under control as fast as we can, and hope the orbitals are as unresponsive as they ever were."

Aiura sighed. "I." Stopped. Restarted. "I am glad that..." She pursed her lips, frowned, tried again to enunciate. I tilted my head as if confused.

"Aiura-_san..._?"

"Forgive me, a moment if-" she stopped, lapsed briefly into English-"if you would please-" Through the gestalt of her body language and involuntary movements I watched the topology of her mind shift and stutter, like the power being cut to a city and the lights shutting down district by district.

"Relax," I murmured. "You'll be back when we don't need your sleeve. Just let go for a while."

Her eyes flickered into sudden awareness. Her mouth shaped the beginnings of a word.

_Poison?_

I waited for the indications of voluntary motion to die before I spoke. Aiura's head lolled towards the window. Skyscrapers streaked past it.

"Hardly. Or, yes, of a sort. I'm more of a virus, really."

I wasn't the first Envoy deployed on Harlan's World to deal with this crisis. Hardly the first. There'd already been a deployment. A dozen Envoys deployed, full-scale by our standards. It'd gone well, at least at first. Outgoing communiqués are always sparse from deployed teams, but every sign had indicated substantial progress.

Then, they'd vanished. A few months had gone by, and it was as if reef demons had scooped them up and carried them away. No traces at all. In an operation with such magnitude of catastrophe in the event of failure, the call had gone up through the halls of the Protectorate regime and well into the highest levels of authority:

_Obsolete. _

The Envoys had _never _failed to put down a revolution before, not for the several hundred years they'd been operational. There'd been near-misses, and once we'd needed to glass a whole city-state, but the Protectorate as a whole had continued to exist.

Now, however: an entire team apparently captured or killed. The Quellists, one of the most dangerous revolutionary groups in the Protectorate, likely in control of an ancient fleet of alien satellites surrounding the planet. An airborne virus, released by the Quellists no doubt, which turned about 1 percent of its hosts into rabid killers in the presence of their aristocrat oligarchs.

An upgrade was in order. Definitely.

"Your dossier was impressive. Your work as a counterespionage enforcer is practically unparalleled. We'll need your resources and network going forward. " I watched her with care as I spoke. If Aiura's consciousness was still in there, if that complex topology of electrical storms strung together across the neuronal substrate of her mind hadn't been settled and calmed into graceful nothingness by what was taking control, I saw no sign.

The Envoys were the right idea, but not taken far enough. An Envoy was a human consciousness that had been weaponised. Now, the Protectorate had taken an Envoy consciousness and made it viral.

I propagate myself through wireless transmissions, or at least it's how I got into Aiura. If a body has the right augmentations I can manufacture and spread via airborne micromachinery instead. Either way, they go to sleep less than an hour after being infected and it's someone else that wakes up several hours later.

I settled back next to her and waited for her to change.


	2. Chapter 2

Consciousness is a complex thing.

I've seen ideograms of it, neural-node schematics summoned by AIs with minds like bank vaults, optimized to handle digitized humans. I've watched them evolve and permutate under the caress of psychosurgery as the AI reroutes vital processes, encysts and removes traumatizing memories. Something very similar to that process was happening in Aiura's sleeve now, with the cortical stack lying dormant and disabled by the invading algorithm. I might need her intact later. She wasn't dead, merely contained. The initial wireless conversation we'd shared had been the initial volley; once the vanguard programs had had time to load I'd sent over the kernel during our conversation. The virus had compromised her at admirable speed.

I sent over more tightbeam wireless instructions while I waited for the program to run its course. Aiura's sleeve set the aircar's destination for her base of operations, and within about an hour we were gliding down onto a landing pad on one of the taller buildings. It was typical post-Unsettlement architecture, all gilded blue steel spikes and arches that owed Gothic architecture a patent or two. Aiura, present yet absent, led me down through DNA-scan locks and elegantly hidden yet potent security. Into a command/control hub at the heart of her headquarters.

It's strange, the way some people fetishize the physical connection. There's no reason at all why Aiura couldn't have just used a neural jack, and avoided an entire room filled with holo-screens. There might be some reason for it; despite all of our work to the contrary our bodies still aren't quite augmented to handle the alien rigors most technology presents. Even the artificial white light generated by the most basic computer screen was known to mess with the endocrine system within decades of its invention, let alone the delusional warpings of reality that can occur when you plug an information network the size of a planet right into the visual cortex. Maybe it had been Aiura's paranoia that had kept her from installing a wireless antenna in her brain that was even marginally more advanced than the bare-bones model which was enough to do her job. Maybe she'd just appreciated the old-school aesthetic. Maybe some of these were costly antiques.

Not that it mattered. It was annoying, though: Envoy conditioning can take in neural jack information with lightning speed. This would take somewhat longer. I had Aiura's sleeve key in the passcodes and began to sift through the data. Quallgrist plague statistics leapt up at me. In parallel, cross-correlations between orbital strike locations over the last year and their associations to Quallgrist plague loci. The datagram ballooned to include yakuza holdings, their southern _haiduci_ competitors-same gangster shit, just Eurasian origins instead of Japanese-then movements of any of the DeCom personnel Aiura's people had managed to trace. Through it all, the movements of known Quellist sympathizers, or at least the few Aiura had managed to find at all, were represented as red lines as thin as hairline fractures. Most were peripheral or uninvolved. A few streaked right through the centre of the entire holographic artifice. 'Sylvie Oshima' was one. 'Takeshi Kovacs' was another.

Centuries ago, only about a hundred years after this planet was colonized, Harlan's World had a bit of a revolt. Typical anti-regime shit: not enough jobs, not enough rights unless you had the money to buy them, enshrined anecdotes of police brutality. It's a consistent pattern going back centuries now. Even without Envoy involvement, the correct responses are so well-known by the oligarchs at this point that keeping the place from turning into a cauldron of violently fractious failed statehood forms a careful but straightforward dance.

At least until Nadia Makita, known to her fans as Quellcrist Falconer, got involved. She wrote up a whole new philosophy about grassroots terrorism, democratic/socialist governance, and anarchism before putting her ideas into practice. The resulting philosophy was dangerous enough that her major works are still barred from publication on Harlan's World and on plenty of planets beyond. It sent Harlan's World into a tailspin. Not one but two wars, the last of which lasted over ten years. It was known, with typical deadpan irony, as the Unsettlement. Inevitably, Konrad Harlan was back in control by the end of it with Nadia Makita KIA, her helicopter shot down by the orbitals as it tried to escape no less. But Quellism, the philosphy and manifesto that she'd penned, survived along with a number of renegade Quellists.

Occasionally this would become a problem. But no one had really taken the Quellists seriously for a generation or so.

"Been a busy couple months," said Aiura's sleeve.

I almost jumped, Envoy control or no. I jerked my head sideways. Aiura's body had folded itself neatly onto one of the chairs and to all appearances was still unconscious. Her eyes were shut, her limbs relaxed. But she spoke.

"Jack, that you?"

"No Jack here." Words that were almost whispers. "Not yet. No conscious control really. More like. Talking in sleep."

Right. Among several useful extras in the viral code was an unconscious subroutine with memory access, barely worth calling AI and more of a glorified dialog tree than anything more. "Will answering questions affect the upload rate?"

"Yes. Have to freeze... process to do so. Every minute talking a minute wasted." Her affect was idiosyncratic to say the least. The words seemed to move between Stripjap, archaic Japanese, and even the occasional Russian.

_Oh well. _"What the hell happened here?"

Pause while the machinery parsed the data.

"Several months ago a DeCom mercenary named Sylvie Oshima came to yakuza interests with a deal. She appeared to be an ex-Quellist who had participated in the second Unsettlement war. She offered to sell the yakuza a virus, a deterrent weapon originally developed by the Quellists, which could sexually transmit a retrovirus which modified the host's genes. There was a 1% chance on average that the host sleeve would then exhibit a pathological, violent hatred towards anyone carrying Konrad Harlan's genes."

I snorted. "Didn't just transmit sexually, did it."

"No," said the sleeve, absent of humor. "The virus was airborne within weeks. The yakuza had planned to use the virus as a negotiation trump card with the Harlanite oligarchy, and hopefully gain a modicum of political control which they have historically lacked. Once they realized the depth of their error, Aiura was contracted by Konrad Harlan and the yakuza to find Sylvie Oshima and resolve the issue."

"How far'd she get?"

"Sylvie Oshima captured successfully. AI analysis of the constituent consciousness found both Sylvie Oshima and a persona with memories and consciousness structure within 1 standard deviation of Nadia Makita's last recorded profile. Makita had been the one to approach the yakuza, with Sylvie in a state of unconsciousness throughout. Before interrogations were complete, a Quellist group successfully mounted a rescue and Oshima was moved beyond Aiura's reach."

"What Quellists?"

"Jack Brasil. Sierra Tres. Virginia Viduara. Mari Ado. Soseki Koi. Takeshi Kovacs. Several additional unidentified members, all KIA." The machine muttered the names in monotone. My eyes traced the hairline filaments that followed them.

"Which one's the ex-Envoy?"

"Takeshi Kovacs and Virginia Viduara are both ex-Envoys."

"Any intel on where they were going last?"

"Last ID was on a rented airboat, used as an entry/escape vehicle. Would you like to review the telemetry?"

"Save it for now. Who were Oshima's yakuza contacts?"

"Primary contact Yukio Hirayasu, now deceased."

"Who's Yukio's _sempai_?"

Brief moment of silence while the nanoware searched through Aiura's mind.

"Yukio's _sempai _is Tanaseda Sadaato."

"Show me everything you have on him."

I watched another curling pattern grow into the datacoil's hologram. It began as a series of separate alienated points, and then the correlations and second-degree-interactions extrapolated and flowed between. The _sempai_'s contacts and conversations, both real and through virtual constructs, his financial holdings, his occasional gambling bouts, the slow build of stresses and opportunities that contributed to his motivations and decisions, all patterned together into mosiac. It looked like the root system of a weed.

I had to pause and admire the map Aiura had made out of the last several months of Harlan's World's history. Human behavior become endlessly-branching fractal growths across a topographical hybrid of geography and virtual dataspace. Agency, free will, and the conscious rationalizations of a collective million human beings abstracted away by data and replaced with the rich complexity of uncounted interacting systems. Easier to see and comprehend the patterns and forces that molded them from this vantage point.

Easier to manipulate too.

Something stirred in me at that thought. It was hard to pin down. It almost felt like the beginnings of anger, and a sweeping sensation of vertigo came with it.

_When they ask me how I died_

I shook it off. Turned back to 'Aiura'.

"How long until the upload process is finished?" I asked.

"Three hours," said the machinery.

Any meeting that ended in less than an hour or so with Aiura's guest stalking furiously out of the complex and leaving in a nice aircar would leave any guards, AI or human, unlikely to disturb Aiura for a little while without good cause. And conversations shorter than a few minutes were easily within the reach of a sleepwalker. The viral AI could handle this until the new me woke up. And something in me needed to move. Results weren't enough. There was a need in me to have a tactile sense of holding on to the problem, of choking the life out of it.

"So where's this _sempai_, then?"


	3. Chapter 3

At the moment, Tanaseda Sadaato was apparently in Newpest. One of the larger cities, it occupies the eastern coastline like an infected wound. I was several hours away from it geographically but seconds away virtually. Kovacs, I remembered distantly as I parked in front of a low-grade VR stall several blocks away from Aiura's upscale fortress, was from there originally. Inside, I plugged myself into one of the neural nodes dangling from a wall socket, its mess of dulled silver electrodes almost colorless in the dim lighting, and settled in next to two other occupants, their bodies listless and vacant. Hypnotic patterns, meant to draw my attention and consciousness into the compliant state necessary for VR experiences, settled and seethed across my vision as the machinery pulled me under. I awoke in a flat, endless gray space which I immediately began to populate with data on the _sempai_. I needed a certain amount of discretion and preparation for this trick, but it didn't take me too long before I felt ready. A few hours in real time can be stretched for days in VR.

VR's a strange beast. At the most basic level it's an environment built from the electrons on up by human beings; its rules may be esoteric, but certainly less esoteric than the ones that govern the physical universe. Thing is, it's been centuries since we could build a virtual world sufficiently illusory to pass as the real one if you don't remember jacking in. It's been even longer since anything human's been writing the rules or compiling the code. Compilers begat parsers begat evolutionary computation begat swarm intelligence; for a while people had to at least start the process off with a carefully-prepared articulation of their needs but a couple centuries ago the firms just started plugging big data into a learning network and the AIs themselves started anticipating everything instead. One top of their incomprehensible yet efficient digital architecture is the everyday virtual reality that human intelligences inhabit and interact in, a dream manufactured in the mind of ineffable giants swimming far below the surface.

You'd think we'd fear that reality more. You'd think it'd bother us. I think it did, once, back before it all seemed run of the mill. But now, living as a dream in the fractured network-spanning consciousness of a digital god is just part of the scenery.

When I booted in, the server nexii resolved around me into alleyway streets with protrusions of bars, hotels, and even the occasional law firm. The streets were the public server infrastructure, the buildings privately owned hubs. Newpest proper lacked a true virtual hub, but the yakuza and various other vested private interests had built their own private hubs. They'd even linked them together, out of some misplaced and obsolete sense of public service, via a ramshackle public server theoretically maintained by the municipality of Newpest.

The yakuza's hub was a bar, carved out of some offshoot breed of yellow sandstone that went well with its tawdry and disused aesthetic. A bouncer waited outside, head bald with heavily muscled tattooed arms and a stocky build. She was leaning against one of the entrance's pillars, shoulder folded neatly against the concrete. Her gaze flickered onto mine as I stepped into her field of view.

"Looking for Tanaseda," I tried.

The bouncer's eyes stared back unblinking. "Who are you?"

"Tell him it's Harlan."

The bouncer's eyes glazed momentarily. The streets were almost entirely deserted, but behind me I could feel one or two passers-by, at least one rubbernecking curiously as they walked away. I wondered idly whether the bouncer was a real person or not; an AI enforcer would be just as effective, but I could almost see the yakuza paying someone to stand door guard even in virtual.

A minute passed. About long enough for Tanaseda to terminate an incoming call and enter this one.

"Enter."

Dimly lit interior, pipe smoke left curling gently in the air like the most fragile of sculptures. A bartender looked up from where he sat behind the table, idly polishing a shot glass. Off the shelf software.

From one corner of the bar, Tanaseda looked up from his sake and his eyes locked onto mine. For the briefest of moments, I felt the beginnings of fear, wondered how many lives Tanaseda had snuffed out over how many long centuries of immortal living assured through money, power, and the routine wonders of cortical stack technology. Then the glory of mission time snuffed it out. Envoy conditioning, awake and moving. Patterns of lies mapped themselves out in my mind like jet contrails.

He gestured with one hand to the seat in front of him. I made my walk to him idle, motioned on the way for a glass of sake like his.

"Tanaseda," I called. "A pleasure."

He waited until I'd sat. Cold green eyes glimmered at me like polished gems.

"And you are?"

"Is this area secure?" I asked him. "And private? No monitoring by anyone else?"

Tanaseda snorted. "Of course. Now, tell me, who is it would use the name _Harlan_ so lightly?"

You can implement body language modification software in VR. Programmed poker faces, minute alterations that hint at suppressed panic or relief when in fact the speaker is in fact experiencing nothing of the sort. One of the things I'd looked for when I was preparing, when I was scraping through Tanaseda's profile with a micrometer comb. He was a bit of a Luddite when it came to those sorts of alterations, as it had turned out. No indication over years of interactions with Aiura that he'd ever relied on those sorts of negotiation augments. A discipline thing, I suppose.

It did make him easier to read for me. I guess he had pretty minimal experience in negotiating with Envoy consciousnesses, especially one that had just spent the last few hours reviewing all of Aiura's recorded negotiations with him. I can't blame him there.

"One of their messengers," I told him, and leaned back as my drink was placed in front of me. I sipped experimentally, and found it was close enough to real for my tastes at least. "The regime has a few things to request of you, _sempai_. Call them reparations."

The _sempai _snorted. "Reparations. Whatever it is, go through the proper channels. Harlan has a yakuza contact, and I am not-"

I slipped a nondescript disk on the table between the two of us.

"What is that?" asked Tanaseda.

I shrugged. "Upload it into your mainframe and see. Just make sure you're connected to the rest of your network when you do so."

Tanaseda stiffened. "What you are insinuating... Is this-"

"No. If we wanted to wipe your stacks, we'd have the grace to do it the old-fashioned way rather than spike your feeds with a virus. But we've decided there needs to be increased monitoring."

The old yakuza sat still as glass for a long moment. Then his hands slammed down on the table in a rare display of anger. I watched with detached interest as the reverberations resonated and died in my sake.

"Go back to whatever bureaucratic master holds your leash, and wish you were _ronin,_" Tanaseda spat. "You interrupt me, make empty boasts of your honored affiliations, threaten me, tell me to turn upon my own. Your master will be contacted, and informed of your behavior, and when he does, I will perhaps request to be present when you are being reprimanded."

"Maybe," I said, and stretched in my seat. "I think Aiura may have something to say about that, though."

The yakuza went very still.

Months prior, it had been Tanaseda who had first spoken with Aiura about the Sylvie and the Quallgrist plague she'd released. He'd been her liaison, and to all appearances they'd kept each other well informed.

But there were indications that he hadn't quite been honest with her. The yakuza were the underdogs here; if they'd been able to isolate Makita and ransom her back to Harlan there would have been political implications lasting for centuries. Aiura had been aware of the possibility, but she'd had too much to lose not to let the yakuza run a bit wilder than she'd probably have liked. When I'd found an encrypted call to Tanaseda buried in his virtual call access history, its telemetry leading through a labyrinth of proxy nodes to a coastline node nearby a _haiduci _base of operations, I'd started to suspect that Tanaseda had some leads.

He certainly hadn't told Aiura.

Add to that the fact that Aiura had been spending a lot of time in virtual, coordinating between her different legions and liaisons. Add the fact that she'd been regularly exchanging data with Tanaseda, that she'd just happened to have terminated a call with him moments prior to when she'd gone out to deal with our little disguised as a suicide strike. That a few hours would be long enough for shit to hit the fan, and as far as Tanaseda knew, for Harlan to lean on her for renewed vigor and improved results.

Call it serendipity, but Tanaseda was off balance, and we'd need the yakuza going forward.

"You're bluffing," he said at last.

"Ask her. Call her up right now. She's the one who sent me here."

He stared, as if an apparition had leapt from my throat and curled into a ghostlike horror in front of him. "Aiura... is aware that we did everything in our power-"

"To avoid making such terrible mistakes, yes. And yet you did." I tilted my head. "We can't afford to withhold information from one another, _sempai._ You are surely aware that the infection has spread to even New Tokyo. We are within days of losing any chance of keeping this contained. You'll open your networks to us."

There. That should be vague enough to put the fear of the angelfire into him. Even if I wasn't entirely on the mark about what he'd been up to.

"I. This must be discussed with the other-"

"It doesn't," I said with brutal finality. "You will bring the programs on this disk back with you into your secured network. You will be contacted. You will upload our remaining intrusion and monitoring software into your virtual holdings using what's on that disk, and the yakuza network will be compromised to us from then on. Any data there will be completely and immediately accessible to us, until we tell you otherwise. And if you don't want to hear it from Aiura, perhaps you could bear hearing it from Harlan."

His face broke, became ashen.

I got up and left without saying another word, left my tab scattered on my half of the table.

The VR was fading from view mere heartbeats after I'd left the yakuza bar. I opened my eyes to find the familiar hypnotic holograms floating in front of me like the hangover after a long night drinking. I reached back and yanked the neural 'trodes off of the dampened skin on the back of my neck, left them dangling for the next customer. My fingers had closed around the earpieces when a toneless voice in my ear said, "Incoming call from-" the voice shifted into monotone-"_No Address Found._ Do you wish to take the call?"

I slipped the trode back on.

"Jack, I presume," I whispered.

On the other end of the line, a soft chuckle. "Jack. A pleasure to meet you, again. But I prefer _Aiura_."

"I'll be sure to keep that in mind."

"Progress?"

"He's been turned."

"Good work. I'll await his call. You're going to New Hok."

"Specifics?"

"On the way. Get us into another sleeve, too. Liu's going back to his day job."

Envoys aren't much for hierarchies, but we functionalized as we went. 'Aiura' was at the information hub. She was the natural candidate for organizing us.

"Noted."


End file.
